TODAY IN HISTORY

1865: Confederate forces west of the Mississippi surrendered in New Orleans.

1938: The House Un-American Activities Committee was established by Congress.

1940: Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of some 338,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk, France, began during World War II.

1954: Explosions rocked the aircraft carrier USS Bennington off Rhode Island, killing 103 sailors. (The initial blast was blamed on leaking catapult fluid ignited by the flames of a jet.)

1971: Don McLean recorded his song “American Pie” at The Record Plant in New York City (it was released the following November by United Artists Records).

1972: President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in Moscow. (The U.S. withdrew from the treaty in 2002.)

1981: Fourteen people were killed when a Marine jet crashed onto the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz off Florida.

1994: Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley were married in the Dominican Republic. (The marriage ended in 1996.)

2004: Nearly a decade after the Oklahoma City bombing, Terry Nichols was found guilty of 161 state murder charges for helping carry out the attack. (Nichols later received 161 consecutive life sentences.)

2009: President Barack Obama nominated federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. California’s Supreme Court upheld the Proposition 8 gay marriage ban but said the 18,000 same-sex weddings that had taken place before the prohibition passed were still valid.

2011: Ratko Mladic, the brutal Bosnian Serb general suspected of leading the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, was arrested after a 16-year manhunt. (Mladic was extradited to face trial in The Hague, Netherlands; he was convicted in 2017 on genocide and war crimes charges and is serving a life sentence.)

2020: Minneapolis police issued a statement saying George Floyd had died after a “medical incident,” and that he had physically resisted officers and appeared to be in medical distress; minutes after the statement was released, bystander video was posted online.